I guess there are some tradeoffs, for sure. I’ve encountered a couple things:

• Bad location functionality. The phone is most likely to blame for this, but I can’t say with certainty. GOS uses a custom proxy server for location related operations, so maybe that’s the reason, or maybe I fiddled too much with settings and messed something up.
• Very ocasional crashes due to exploit protection. This almost never happens, but can be annoying. Some app may have a bug that would be overlooked by another OS or try to access some feature that is considered exploitable and the system will kill it, letting you know why with a notification. You can fine-tune these protections at the system or app level to make it work for you though (at your own risk).
• If “tap to pay” refers to NFC payments through some app like Google Pay, I think they do work. You just have to enable NFC (you can even enable it only if the device is unlocked, which is cool), and configure contactless payments with your payment app. I don’t use this feature though, so I’m not speaking from personal experience.

I think that’s it, really. I found the actual user experience to be quite breezy.

I’ve been rocking a Pixel 8 pro with Graphene OS for a year and change and it was a great experience after being an iPhone user for 8 years aproximately.

The install process is great, automatic and foolproof, you just need the phone, usb cable (probably came with your phone) and a computer with a Chromium-based browser.

App support hasn’t been a problem for me, you can reach for Aurora Store (anonymous Play Store client) if you really need something from there. Otherwise you have F-droid and the usual suspects and also Accrescent, which Graphene offers through its own app store, but barely has anything as of today.

I setup Shelter to have some apps more isolated and being able to just not see them if I want, namely some Microsoft apps I need for work and some that depend o Google’s services. Shelter is recommended by privacyguides.org, so you should be fine using it.

I think Pixel/Graphene is probably your best option for security if you need it. Privacy I guess you can achieve many other ways.

I read your issue and you left some great advice. Thank you for taking the time to write something thoughtful! As you probably guessed I really had barely any idea of how the module system worked, but it’s nice seeing it’s a bit similar to Rust’s. I will look into the switch script, which will be convenient, and apply your suggestions, since I basically agree with all of them 🙌

You’re missing out man, I’ve been daily driving NixOS for almost two years now and I can’t go back. It’s not that complex to set up and it’s great knowing most of what’s on your system at a glance by looking at a config file.

It’s a bit LMAO-worthy, yes. I have it mostly out fear some sofware might break on Hyprland at a bad time, and because I’m too lazy to look for some basic utilities separately.